


kaddish

by mahariels



Series: all your bridges are burning [4]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Character, Pre-Relationship, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 06:52:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5365499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahariels/pseuds/mahariels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Every day Rosa remains alive, there’s another little reminder that her world has ended twice and continues to end in the most mundane ways.</i>  To put it another way: how do you mourn your husband when you can't even say the prayer for the dead properly?</p>
            </blockquote>





	kaddish

**Author's Note:**

> set prior to "first watch." possibly fudged decomp details a bit for the sake of the story (and who knows what the effects of being frozen in a pod that long would be, anyway).
> 
> also, if anyone was curious, [here's](http://i.imgur.com/oRx8b5u.jpg) rosa, her first week and few [months](http://i.imgur.com/30dAmPc.jpg) in the commonwealth.

Every day Rosa remains alive, there’s another little reminder that her world has ended twice and continues to end in the most mundane ways. It’s not always as bad as the first day when she stumbled out of the Vault numb with grief and wracked with hunger and spent a good three hours staring at a two-headed cow and having an _intense_ internal debate about whether the fact that it had two heads would make it _terefah_ before finally giving in to practicality, shooting it in the head, and eating the charred meat she butchered herself. But it’s still jarring. 

Like walking into Diamond City and realizing that the entire city’s decorated for Christmas when to the best of her knowledge, she’s the only living Jew left in the Commonwealth.

She forces herself not to show any sign of the unease she feels as they drop off the deathclaw egg to its interested buyer; she bargains, as always, for more caps with the brass balls you only develop in law school and the Army. As they walk away steadily but quickly, before the mark can change its mind. Also as always, Mac’s figured out something’s wrong but is giving her the space to tell him rather than pushing the issue. Those small gestures he makes are the reasons she’s so fucking grateful to him, in ways she can’t ever tell him and can’t entirely admit to herself. 

Instead of asking putting her on the spot, he keeps quiet as they’re eating lunch; alternates between slurping his noodles loudly and messily and hassling the noodle robot which, if it _could_ actually express emotion, she’s fairly sure is exasperated to the point of tears. The only thing it says is, “Nani ni shimasu ka?” over and over again, more and more plaintively each time.

Rosa eats her own noodles less enthusiastically. She hasn’t been able to keep kosher for the year or so since she’s been unfrozen, and she still hasn’t gotten over the twinge of guilt every time she takes the first bite. At the very least, she’s got no clue what goes _into_ the noodles, so at least there’s some amount of plausible deniability. And it’s not like she hasn’t done a hell of a lot worse in that time.

“Give it a rest, Kid,” she orders as Takahashi chirps “Nani—” for the umpteenth time.

“Aw, Boss, I was just getting started,” Mac drawls, and slurps a loud mouthful of noodles. Despite the clowning, he’s watching her from the corner of his eye with that careful evaluation he turns on a target before a fight starts.

She scowls back at him so that he won’t get the wrong idea, because she’s _fine_. “They do this every year?” she asks, gesturing to the little tree at their side.

“Guess so,” Mac says. “Only been in the Commonwealth a year or so myself.”

She makes a noncommittal noise, and turns the glare on the tree. It hasn’t done anything to her, of course, but if it wouldn’t cause more problems than she needs with security she’d probably turn her rifle on it right then and there. It’s the little things that stick out, earning the focus of her ire. She woke up two hundred years out of time, Nate is dead and frozen in his icy coffin, and she’s eating noodles on Christmas eve with a mercenary who’s the closest thing she’s had to a friend in two hundred years.

It’s ironic, sure, but if she thinks too much about it, she’s going to punch someone.

It’s not until they head back out into the world beyond the walls and kill a few raiders who thought they could get the drop on unsuspecting travelers leaving Diamond City that he decides to pipe up. “The h—what’s going on, Boss?” he asks as they rifle through the corpses’ pockets.

“It’s nothing,” she replies, aware of how stiff her voice sounds. It never used to sound like that, but many things have changed.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing,” Mac says. He pockets the caps he finds tucked inside the raider’s shirt and when she doesn’t even ask him to split them, he waggles his eyebrows at her. “You look about twice as eager to murder me than usual.”

Mac has been one of the curveballs the Commonwealth has thrown at her. When she hired him on, she had expected exactly what he promised, which was a professional relationship based on his gun and her caps. Whatever’s happened in the meantime confuses her to the point of fury, so she does not like to think of it. “It’s nothing,” she says again. It’s not nothing, and he knows it, but because he’s Mac, he backs off with a shrug and a small smile, and Rosa’s chest twinges like the sharp, breathless pain of a broken rib.

When they return to Sanctuary, she tells him to leave, to go and socialize with the others. It’s easy to forget sometimes that he’s only twenty-two and that he’s practically a fetus when it comes down to it. It’s comforting, in a way that doesn’t make sense, to watch him sharing a drink with Sturges at the bar she built for their little community, to remember that even though the world is still ending, there are these moments of normalcy. She doesn’t watch for long, because she thinks she makes some of the settlers uncomfortable, and she goes to catch up with Preston and Hancock and see whether there’s any Minuteman business that needs handling (there always, always is) and to turn down Hancock’s offer of Jet with a shake of her head.

Later that night, she lays awake in the dark room she shared with Nate. It’s a new bed she built shortly after arriving in Sanctuary Hills. There was something too morbid, even for her, about sleeping in that two hundred year old grave. And she had torn Shaun’s crib apart with her bare hands. There were some things she had to let go, but some things she could _not_ let go. It’s been over a year and her husband is still alone in the vault, and she has never been able to say the kaddish for him. She’s been moving and fighting so long she couldn’t take the time to grieve.

No. That’s a lie. She could have taken the time, but she’s been too fucking scared to go back to the Vault and face what she knows she’ll find there. When it comes down to it, Rosa is a fucking coward, and she’s ashamed of herself, the shame burning with a heat that threatens to consume her.

She finds herself sliding out of the bed, fumbling into her jumpsuit and armor and making the walk across the way to the settlers’ dormitory. Although Mac hates it, he stays there when they’re in Sanctuary with only a little grumbling every time. This evening, she finds him on the second floor, fast asleep. He sleeps like a little kid, too, his arms and legs thrown haphazardly in every direction, mouth open.

“Kid,” she whispers, so she won’t wake up anyone else, giving him a little nudge. 

She can see the change in him, instantly. He’s a light sleeper and always on edge, even in a supposedly safe place, but he’s trained the worst of his instincts away. The first time she woke him up for a watch change when they’d been on the road, he’d punched her right in the face before realizing she wasn’t actually a gunner come to collect his bounty. “Boss,” he whispers back.

“I need a favor.” She feels guilty, asking him to do this, but there’s no one else she _can_ ask.

“What’s up?” He’s already sitting up and fumbling for his rifle; it was a question without any question that he’d come with her, and she feels that broken-rib feeling again. 

“I’ll tell you on the way,” she whispers. “It shouldn’t be very long.”

“I got your back,” he says firmly.

“…Thank you.”

He doesn’t question her when he sees that she’s carrying one of the large green ammunition duffels; doesn’t question her when they don’t take the usual road out of Sanctuary, hiking their way up the hills instead of passing through the bridge gate, fortified with turrets and always with a sentry on guard. It’s not until he catches sight of the fences of the vault compound just over the crest of the hill. “Boss… you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” she says. “This is what’s been wrong. It’s been too long.I need. I need to bring him home.”

Mac licks his lips, but only says, “You got it.” 

It takes every ounce of willpower that she has to walk into the command pod and press the button to prime the elevator. It’s taken her a year to get to this point, and if she doesn’t keep her spine absolutely steeled, her face absolutely stone, she’ll break. If she looks at Mac and sees a hint of concern on his face, she’s going to crumble. So she doesn’t look over her shoulder, just walks forward onto the elevator platform. Her boots sound very loud on the metal. 

Mac follows.

The hiss of compressed air as the elevator drops throws her stomach into wild nausea, and it’s only the last year of forcing herself to keep moving, to keep fighting, that keeps her on her feet. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them until the platform jars to a halt and she can smell the difference in the air, pure but stale and close. Whatever panic she feels, she can’t afford to indulge. She concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, ignoring the chaos in her stomach and head. 

“This is where you waited out the bombs, huh?” Mac mutters, from somewhere behind her. “F—creepy.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Rosa says. She remembers the way into the vault so clearly, that first day, rushing in a blind panic to make sure that her family was safe. She remembers the way out just as clearly, stumbling back out. She had not cried then.

She does not cry now, as she and Mac walk into the room where her life ended. The pods are as she remembers them, the corpses of her neighbors curled in protective poses. And Nate. The world narrows around her, focused only on the pod with his face inside. She stops. For a moment, she feels like her knees might buckle. She forces them to remain stiff.

At her side, Mac swallows, hard. “Hey, I’m really sorry. We don’t have to be here if you don’t want to. I… I’ll leave you alone.”

“Stay,” she says. It comes out sharp and brittle. An order. “If you will.”

“God—of course, Boss. D—I will.”

She sits in front of the pod, staring at Nate’s frozen features. It’s terrible, that this is the way she will always see him when she thinks of him. Not the laughing smile he had, those early days together in the army. Not the serious, sad look he wore after returning from the front. Not the soft, awed expression on his face when the doctor had handed him Shaun for the first time. It could have been minutes, or it could have been hours. Finally she pulls herself together and presses the pod’s manual control for the first time.

She does not flinch when Nate’s body drops into her arms. She cannot. She does not falter.

“Boss—” Mac is at her side immediately, his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m fine, Kid. It’s okay,” she says. It is not okay. It is _not_ okay. But she cannot. She cannot. “Help me.”

Together, they manage to maneuver Nate’s body into the bag. He feels so much lighter than she remembers him feeling ( _mummification will do that to you_ , her brain whispers, and her stomach responds with a lurch of nausea). She concentrates on her breathing. In and out. One, and two, and three. If she does that, she and Mac will be able to leave the vault with Nate between them.

She has to stop thinking of him as Nate. Or as him. What they are carrying is the _body_. The _memory_. 

_Baruch dayan emet._

_Baruch dayan emet_.

_Baruch dayan emet._

Mac is still with her. There is a strange expression on his face, and she cannot decipher it but somehow she knows that he truly understands, in a way that no one else at Sanctuary would have. She isn’t sure how she knows this, but her gut is rarely wrong. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Fuck it,” Mac says, and she is surprised, because he usually tries so hard not to curse, “Boss. Don’t thank me. ‘Course I would’ve done it and I’d do it again.”

A lump rises in her throat, so she chooses to say nothing. Looks away, so he won’t see the gleam in her eyes, and blinks the tears back furiously. Her body is a traitor.

In the days to come, she will not entirely remember how she managed to carry Nate’s body down the hills from the Vault and back into Sanctuary. Mac is a steady presence at her side, and she’s gotten so fucking used to forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other that her body responds automatically. By the time they come down the hills, the sun is beginning to rise, because her life is a bad movie with terrible dramatic timing. The settlers are also beginning to rise to go about their day, and she can hear the gasps of surprise when someone first catches sight of them, the bag slung carefully over their shoulders.

Preston has it figured out more quickly than most, what has happened, and he nods sharply to her and quickly begins the task of making sure the settlers are corralled away from them until she and Mac can bring Nate’s body home. Away from prying eyes. She tells herself that she needs to give Preston something, some gesture of thanks, because there is one thing she can’t fucking manage right now, and that’s dealing with the flock under her protection and their _sympathy._

Together, she and Mac bring Nate home and he helps her lay the body on the kitchen table.

“Boss, do you—”

“I’m fine. MacCready. I… need to do this myself.”

He’s frowning at her, but says, “I’ll be outside.”

The task is overwhelming. If the world was a different place, she would take Nate to a funeral home where the proper _tahara_ could be performed, where the proper prayers could be said over his body and it could be prepared for a burial in accordance with custom. She doesn’t know the details. All she knows is that the body is covered with a sheet and washed, and that _yahrzeit_ candles are burned during the process. They have candles and she doesn’t know if she can afford to waste a sheet, not when cloth is so scarce and half of the beds in Sanctuary are undressed as it is. They certainly can’t afford to waste all of the water required for the true _taharah,_ not even with the new industrial water generator she’d had built. It’s a different world, and she’s already had to adapt to survive. It seems like the last indignity that even now, after she’s finally managed to bring him home, she still can’t do right by him.

It’s an overwhelming task, but she has to start somewhere, so Rosa Solomon undresses her husband for the last time.

It’s the longest few hours of her life, carefully washing the blood from his body, the dirt from beneath two hundred year old finger nails. She begins on the right side, moving to the left. First his hands, then his arms, hands, torso, legs, feet, relearning his body in death. His skin feels papery and dry, his frame desiccated and wasted from the cold. _Baruch dayan emet. Baruch dayan emet_. She carefully closes his eyelids, collects the stray hairs that have fallen in the process, the bloodied rag she used to clean his wound. They’ll be buried with him, and the flag he came home with. It’s all she has left that belonged to him; his _tallit_ was destroyed with the bombs or with time. Only the flag, preserved carefully in glass, has survived.

At the end, she wraps him in her own blanket, carefully places shards of a broken bowl on his eyelids and mouth. It’s a haphazard sort of dressing: no _afar_ , no headdress. Just the blanket, the flag, and the shards. It occurs to her then that even if she can perform the service by herself—and her memory is rusty as hell—it won’t even matter, because she’s the only one here who can make up a _minyan,_ and so technically, none of it counts anyway.

It will do. Nate will understand that in the end, after all of her faults, she tried to do right by him.

True to his word, Mac stands guard at the door the entire day, and is still there when she finishes, exhausted but determined to see this through. He and Preston take turns sitting with her during the vigil that long night, silent presences at her side. It _is_ a long night. She does not cry. She cannot cry. She does not touch Nate’s body, sits ramrod straight with her hands in her lap, impassive as a statue. 

In the morning she takes a shovel to dig the grave behind the house where they spent the second year of their married life, after they’d been discharged. Nate had been so proud of it, of what they’d accomplished together. The morning of the bombs he’d been teasing her about dusting off her old law degree and putting it to good use. And now, two hundred and ten years later, she was digging his grave in the backyard whose grass he had mowed himself even though Codsworth would have cheerfully done it for him.

God had a twisted sense of humor.

“Boss?” Mac says from behind her. She’s waist deep in earth, sweating despite the cold.

“What?”

“Take a break.”

“I’m—”

“Yeah, you’re fine. I know, you’re always fine. Take a goddamn break, okay? I’ll finish it.”

She’s about to protest when he forcibly grabs the shovel out of her hands and she’s too tired to fight back. It’s then that she surrenders, lets him finish the job. Flops down on her back in the frozen, stunted dirt.

Preston sits down next to her as Mac works, and takes off his hat, one hand nervously smoothing itself over his closely cropped hair. “My condolences, General.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“Is there… anything we can do? The settlers, the Minutemen? Me?” 

“What do you mean?” Rosa is so exhausted that at first she can’t entirely process it.

“Well, we’ve buried a lot of good men and women ourselves, over the last few years,” he says, hollow regret low in his voice. “I hate to say I’ve got practice, but if I can… if there’s anything I can do, to help you. Please let me. Let _us_.”

The lump is rising in her throat again and rather than give in to it, she says, “Actually… there is something.”

And that is how Preston, Piper, Mac, Hancock, Sturges, the Longs, Mama Murphy, and two other settlers and even Codsworth end up standing by the graveside in a strange sort of makeshift minyan as she murmurs the _eyl malei rachamim_ , as Preston and Mac help her lower Nate’s body into the grave itself, wrapped only in the blanket and flag, curled up in the embrace of the cold earth. Her world may have ended, but continues on in its own way, this strange group she’s assembled here to serve in place of tradition.

She stands before them, her back straight, her chin up, and she does not cry as she says the kaddish. “ _Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash, sh’mei raba_. Amen.” She swallows hard. “ _B’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei, v’yam’likh mal’khutei, b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon, uv’chayei d’khol beit yisrael. Ba’agala uviz’man kariv, v’imru,_ amen.” Around her, heads are bowed respectfully; a little awkwardly. No one is entirely sure how to react. She does not care. The words rise from her chest, quietly at first, growing stronger as she speaks. “Amen. _Y’hie sh’mei raba m’varakh ‘alam ul’al’mei al’maya. Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar v’yit’romam v’yit’nasei. V’yit’hadar, v’yit’aleh, v’yit’halal, sh’mei d’kud’sha_ , b’rikh hu.” This is what he would have wanted. This is what _she_ has wanted, all of these long months. This was their heritage, their unspoken promise to each other. “ _Leila min kol bir’khata v’skirata, tush b’chetah v’nechematah, da’ameeran b’al’mah, v’eemru._ Amen.”

She looks up to find Mac watching her with that inscrutable expression, blue eyes wide and fixed on her face. When he notices she’s watching, he looks down. 

“ _Y’hei sh’lama raba min sh’maya, v’chayim alenu v’al kol yisrael, v’im’ru,_ amen. _Oseh shalom bim’romav, hu ya’aseh shalom, alenu v’al kol Yisrael, v’im’ru,_ amen.”

Later, after the settlers have left, Mac helps her bury him. It takes a much shorter time now than it did to dig; the finality of the sound of earth on rock makes her shiver.

In the end, she places the small stones on his grave, presses them into the dirt.

She can’t afford to sit shiva for him, not in this world she’s woken up to. This world doesn’t pause for grief; it doesn’t stop for custom. And even so, the time for that has long passed. But she’s finally laid Nate to rest, and Rosa has so much fucking _work_ to do until she can join him. She looks up from her hands, covered in dirt and white knuckled into fists. Mac’s standing there, rifle slung comfortably over his shoulders (because of course he brought his rifle to a funeral). There’s a strange expression on his face as he watches her, but he doesn’t say anything. 

Their eyes meet, that long moment, before she forces herself to nod and says, “All right, Kid. We’ve got a robot detective to find.”

 


End file.
